"You’ll see me around town," she said Nov. 5 in a telephone interview from her home. "You should have seen me before I was elected."

Looking back over five terms on the council and four years on the city’s first elected school board, Mason said her greatest accomplishment was helping establish elected government in the District of Columbia.

"I helped get established an elected board of education and an elected city council," she said. "When I first came here there were no elected people."

She also cited with pride her role in establishing the University of the District of Columbia and its law school, as well as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, of which she is a member of the board.

More recently, Mason helped set up the Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams Morgan, said Doug Hartnett, her campaign manager and right-hand man.

Mason said she can only hope the District will see a brighter future.

"I can only hope things are going to improve in the District, and (I will) help in any way that I can to make this a better place to live," she said. "I want economic development, but I don’t want it to affect people here negatively. We have to make sure they have jobs and health care."

Mason said she would advise mayor-elect Anthony Williams not to forget that the government should do more than balance the budget; it should have compassion. She said she hopes Williams will follow through on the talk he put forward in his campaign about services to the poor, children and the elderly.

"Part of (the) concern is that there are no council members left who have the historical perspective," Hartnett said. "None of them remember what it was like not to have an elected government."

Mason said she is concerned that District residents, many of whom have no memory of the city’s struggle for home rule, not abandon the quest for statehood.

"When I first came to the District (in 1945), I came from Virginia where blacks couldn’t vote and I was surprised that the people in the nation’s capital did not have the same rights as people in other places," she said.

"If we are going to be here, we are going to pursue the same rights and privileges that others do around the country — nothing less than statehood and full self-determination. If you don’t have statehood, you don’t have democracy."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator